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DISAGREEMENT, RELATIVISM and DOXASTIC REVISION J. Adam Carter

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DISAGREEMENT, RELATIVISM and DOXASTIC REVISION J. Adam Carter (Forthcoming in the Erkenntnis special issue on “Disagreements,” eds. T. Marques & D. Cohnitz) DISAGREEMENT, RELATIVISM AND DOXASTIC REVISION J. Adam Carter ABSTRACT: I investigate the implication of the truth-relativist’s alleged ‘faultless disagreements1’ for issues in the epistemology of disagreement. A conclusion I draw is that the type of disagreement the truth-relativist claims (as a key advantage over the contextualist) to preserve fails in principle to be epistemically significant in the way we should expect disagreements to be in social-epistemic practice. In particular, the fact of faultless disagreement fails to ever play the epistemically significant role of making doxastic revision (at least sometimes) rationally required for either party in a (faultless) disagreement. That the truth-relativists’ disagreements over centred content fail to play this epistemically significant role that disagreements characteristically play in social epistemology should leave us sceptical that disagreement is what the truth-relativist has actually preserved. 1. Introduction: Two Debates About Disagreement Disagreement plays important philosophical roles in current debates in social epistemology and in the philosophy of language, though for very different reasons. In the philosophy of language, arguments from faultless disagreement are used to motivate truth-relativism over contextualism in certain areas of discourse. In social epistemology, disagreement is at the centre of debates between conformists and non-conformists about doxastic revision (in the face of disagreement with a recognised epistemic peer). What can these debates learn from each other? This is a largely unexplored question. My aim here is to develop a particular strand of connection between these debates; specifically, I explore the implications for the debate between conformism and non- conformism in social epistemology if the truth-relativist’s picture of disagreement is right. As we’ll see, the implications are more substantial than one might originally suspect. Toward the end of exploring these implications, I want to first (in §2) give a clear, general picture of the role disagreement plays in arguments for truth relativism, and in §3 I’ll outline and discuss just how disagreement over centred content is supposed to work, both in theory in practice. In §4, I’ll explain briefly what is at stake between conformists and non- conformists in the epistemology of disagreement, focusing on the role recognized peer 1 Faultless disagreement-style arguments are typically used motivate truth-relativism in various domains of discourse. For canonical presentations of faultless disagreement arguments for truth- relativism, see Kolbel (2003) and MacFarlane (2007). See also M. Kolbel and M. Garca-Carpintero (Eds.), Relative Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, for a collection of recent papers defending and opposing arguments from faultless disagreement. Cf. Cappelen & Hawthorne (2010) for a recent challenge to these arguments, and to truth-relativism more generally. 1 disagreement is supposed to play in doxastic revision. In §5, I’ll explore the question of whether centred-content disagreements appealed to by truth-relativists can play the same epistemically significant role with respect to questions about whether doxastic revision is rationally required in the face of such recognized disagreements with epistemic peers. 2. Truth-relativism, contextualism and disagreement Considerations to do with disagreement bolster an argument characteristic of a recent wave of what I’ll call “New Relativism2” in the philosophy of language. New Relativists endorse truth-relativism in certain areas of discourse where the truth of claims seems to depend, as MacFarlane puts it, ‘not only on how things are with the objects they explicitly concern, but on how things are with some subject not explicitly mentioned.’ Examples of such areas of discourse that have been fertile ground for New Relativists are: predicates of personal taste3, epistemic modals4, knowledge attributions5, future contingents6, gradable adjectives7 and indicative conditionals8. The most fertile ground for New Relativism has been discourse involving predicates of personal taste, and for ease of exposition, I’ll articulate the truth- relativist’s position vis-à-vis this particular area of discourse. Let P represent the area of discourse that is predicates of personal taste (such as tasty, fun). Truth-relativism with respect to P-utterances claims that (roughly): the truth of one’s P- utterance depends in part on a context of assessment—the context in which the proposition is being evaluated as true or false. Accordingly, “Miniature golf is fun,” does not get a truth- value simpliciter; it gets a truth value only once, as Lasersohn (2005) puts it, a judge or standards parameter (in the context of evaluation) is specified. And the relevant standard at play in the context of assessment is not uniquely determined by the context of use. As Crispin Wright (2007) has put it: vary [the context of assessment] and the truth value of the utterance can vary, even though the context of its making and the associated state of the world remain fixed. This is a somewhat simplistic view of the truth-relativist position, but it will do for now. Even the briefest reflection on the implications of truth-relativism reveals the position to constitute a radical departure from orthodoxy. Why exactly would one endorse truth-relativism in any domain of discourse? After all, as Cappelen & Hawthorne (2010) 2 I’m following here Maria Baghramian’s (forthcoming) terminology; Cappelen & Hawthorne (2010) refer to this recent movement in analytic philosophy of language “analytic relativism” while Wright (2007) refers to the position as “New Age Relativism.” 3 For some defences of truth-relativism about predicates of personal taste, see Lasersohn (2005), Stephenson (2007) and Kölbel (2003). Cf. Cappelen & Hawthorne (2010), Ch. 4, for some recent opposition. 4 See (Egan 2007; Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson 2007; Stephenson 2007 and MacFarlane 2011c). 5 For defences of truth-relativism about knowledge attributions, see Richard (2004); MacFarlane (2005; 2010). 6 See MacFarlane (2003). 7 See Richard (2004). 8 For example, Weatherson (2006). 2 point out, the idea of the same proposition being true for Sam but not for Dean runs deeply contrary to our ordinary thinking about the contents of thought and talk—particularly, that the objects of thought and talk (i.e. propositions) bear truth and falsity as monadic properties. There would have to be very good reason to give up this elegant and pre-philosophically intuitive picture. MacFarlane thinks there are plenty of good reasons, and although he is not by any means the only New Relativist, his defences of truth-relativism across a spectrum of domains of discourse have been the most sophisticated in the literature; accordingly, I’ll be considering the role of disagreement in the truth-relativist’s argument broadly on MacFarlane’s own terms, and again, by focusing on predicates of personal taste (hereafter, P-utterances) as the representative area of discourse—though I will at times use examples from discourse concerning epistemic modals. As MacFarlane sees things, disagreement and subjectivity are twin desiderata that must be accommodated by any theory of the truth-conditions of P-utterances (and in other domains of discourse where truth-relativism is defended). To be explicit, a theory of the truth-conditions of P-utterances succeeds only if accounting for both Subjectivity: how the truth of P-utterances depends in part on how things are with some subject not explicitly mentioned; and Disagreement: how when some subject A makes a P-utterance “ɸ” and B replies “Not ɸ”, this exchange constitutes a genuine disagreement. Toward this end, the contextualist fares quite well in so far as the goal is to preserve subjectivity. For the contextualist, the proposition “Kalamata olives are tasty”, uttered by A, encodes A’s standards; accordingly, the proposition expressed by this utterance is (something like) “Kalamata olives are tasty (to A).” This already is a mark in favour of contextualism over invariantist approaches, which fail to account for how “Kalamata olives are tasty” is (when true) true in part due to facts about the utterer’s own tastes. The contextualist appears to be in trouble, though, when it comes to the second desiderata: preserving the insight that there can be genuine P-disagreements of the form: A: ɸ (e.g. Miniature golf is fun) B: ~ ɸ (e.g. Miniature golf is not fun) For the contextualist, A’s utterance expresses the proposition that miniature golf is fun to A, while B’s assertion expresses the proposition that miniature golf is not fun to B; accordingly, for the contextualist, there is no commonality of content about which A and B disagree. So the contextualist has no way to account for genuine P-disagreements. Or so the argument goes. As MacFarlane (and the contextualist) recognizes, the contextualist is not dead in the water at this point. Drawing from Lewis (1989), the contextualist could—following here 3 DeRose (2002)—invoke the shared scoreboard analogy in an effort to save disagreement9. On this analogy, the relevant standard in play is whatever standard is operative in the conversational context, and this standard can shift during the course of the conversation as different conversational moves are made. Consider here the case of knowledge-attributions: once (say) a particularly scary sceptical
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